AppleCentral was kinda' slow(no one here posting for a while)so I dropped in on E-Bay just to "window-shop"and everything locked up REPEATEDLYafter about 20 minutes of sheer frustrationI was about to give up.. when it occurred to mewhat was happening was TOO MANY PEOPLE LOGGED ONAT THE SAME TIME! Bolloxed Up the Works!

Then what happened to the ACA Sites FINALLY Made Sense

This "TRAIN-WRECK" that the jaggovz are whinging aboutis because it was "A DISASTER" but rather IT WAS A SUCCESS! TOO MANY PEOPLE INTERESTED!!!

No wonder they're busting a gut to convincethe rubes that it's No Good!

What is an example of a website of similar scale and complexity - meant to handle millions of unique visits per day; with a back-end working seamlessly with dozens of diverse government systems as well as those of dozens more private corporations; while presenting to the user a relatively simple, easy-to-use, and efficient interface -- that actually "worked," fully-formed and scaled, straight out of the gate from day one?

I'm hard-pressed to think of any site of similar size and complexity (eBay? YouTube? Twitter? Are there any?) that didn't first grow from fairly modest origins over a period of months/years.

A PR boondoggle for sure. But I'm wondering from a nuts-and-bolts perspective if expectations for this roll-out weren't a wee bit unreasonable ...

Quote:

One day on ebay for Black Friday is not a comparison.

Why not? Seems to me sites like eBay are the only real comparisons we have. And if even a mature and smoothly-operating site like eBay can still be brought to it's knees on Black Friday, why does that not compare to an arguably more complex and massive site for which every day is Black Friday?

Any site can be overwhelmed, given the right circumstances. But to your point regarding expectations, it's pretty obvious there wasn't nearly enough beta testing prior to go live, which led to zero management of said expectations. This was an avoidable screw-up on a large scale. That said, give it another 60 days of improving performance and growing enrollment, and — to the great disappointment of the right — most peeps will find themselves focused more on their new benefits and improved healthcare than on 404's.

it's pretty obvious there wasn't nearly enough beta testing prior to go live, which led to zero management of said expectations.

How does one even beta test something like this without actually having millions (or hundreds of thousands) of people actually stress the site? Sure that volume and interaction can be predicted and to some extent even simulated, but even those models get it wrong a lot of the time. To that extent nothing is going to really compare to actual live use ...

You're right that the rollout horribly managed (or rather, didn't manage at all) expectations for the site. It probably would have been better to just say "it's going to be a rocky start, folks -- things this big tend to be that way. But it'll get worked-out after a month or two." The Republicans would still have hammered it, but at least that would have been better than just letting everyone find out for themselves.

That having been said, I'm not sure how fair it is at this date to still say "it should have just worked" when history and logic would dictate something of this size and complexity would have tremendous issues when going live ...

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